I am not sure this commercial would entice me to buy a Ford model car, but it does make me quite proud of the creative team behind it. To whomever came up with the concept, and to the engineers and musicians to made it happen.

In the video, various car parts from the 2008 Ford Focus were made into musical instruments. And then played, orchestra style. The innovation behind a creation like that – amazing. (It’s not the first time this has been done – read here)

The ad was released earlier this year in the UK. Some info on the creative team:

We’ve been trying to go more "green" at home – from using re-usable shopping bags, to organic purchases of food and cleaning products. Slowly but surely we’re making some changes.

The latest change I’m going to adopt is to save the corks from my wine bottles. Not like there are many, but keeping them out of the landfill sounds like a great idea.

Terracycleis a company that will recycle corks – or rather, upcycling them. They will be turning both natural and synthetic corks into other products, like doormats.

So, send your corks over to Terracycle. They’ll even tell you how much postage to put on your package of corks. They also upcycle other unusual product waste, like cookie wrappers, drink pouches, energy bar wrappers, and yogurt containers. Some of this recycling will give you cash back, which is a great incentive.

The Great b5media Blog Off will begin on June 20th at 12:01am (in each writer’s respective time zone), to celebrate the summer solstice, which hasn’t occurred on any date other than June 21st since 1975 – this year it lands on June 20th. Writers for many of our sites (including me!) will be posting fresh news at least once per hour for a full 24 hours.

We are looking for guest posts on the 23 participating Entertainment sites, and also for charity donations to The Actors Fund. You can learn more here and here.

The Business channel at b5 is also participating in the Blog Off to support Accion International. You can read more here.

Last week, we drove from Vancouver to Banff to attend nextMEDIA and the Banff World Television Festival. I learned, on the long drive there and back, that I really love podcasts of stories. It really helped keep me awake on the drive. We listened to about 6 months of the Vinyl Cafe (though not all podcasts have stories, which was disappointing) and a book and a half by Cory Doctorow.

It was great to spend some time with Jeremy at the conference, as well as fellow b5ers Jeanne & Jyle Dupuis. We took a "b5 family" photo before Jeremy headed back to Toronto.

Jeremy had a good talk with Kris after speaking at nextMEDIA. Check it out:

The next few days we attended an endless stream of sessions and networking events at the Banff World Television Festival, including the Banff World Television Awards where Kim Cattrall was honored. Our hotel wireless was broken for our entire stay, so that put a bit of a damper on the ability to keep up with work and post timely news on the conferences. It definitely set me a few days back on my return.

The festival was aimed at the business side of the tv industry – for producers, executives, writers, etc. I learned a lot from attending the sessions – they had a great lineup of speakers, and I was only disappointed not to be able to attend more than I did. The networking events were also very well put on – we didn’t attend many after-parties, but the days themselves were full of networking breaks and the BBQ was the best of the bunch.

You can read some of my posts on the sessions I enjoyed the most here:

I am a fan of the reality competition America’s Got Talent,primarily because I think the criteria are broad enough to really allow for more talent to be showcased. The audition stage, unlike with many reality competition shows, will showcase more good (vs bad) auditions.

Although I missed the show last night, Jeanne tipped me to the video of Kaitlyn Maher, who just turned 4 years old. She sang on the show and has now become the youngest contestant ever to get through to the next round.